Zynga Launches CityVille on iOS With Hometown, Android Version Expected

Following close on the heels of Hanging With Friends’ release last week, Zynga Mobile announces today that its CityVille Facebook franchise will make move onto mobile devices with CityVille Hometown.

The game is a standalone iOS title with some light connectivity to the Facebook version. In Hometown, players are responsible for recruiting neighbors to a small community that they bolster through the construction of houses, farms and industry structures. Though players are free to construct what they want when they want, Hometown features some narrative elements in the form of quests attached to in-game neighbors that players recruit. Players can also recruit real life friends as neighbors. Zynga says the bumber of neighbors a player can have is capped at 500.

CityVille Hometown uses Facebook Connect to find and organize a player’s friends list. If players already have a CityVille game going on Facebook, Zynga says there will be connections through messaging, certain items that can be earned across both games and special help requests mobile players can fulfill for Facebook players. Beyond that, however, Zynga General Manager of Mobility Justin Cinicolo says the goal is to have a mobile product rather than a mobile port of an existing product.

CityVille Hometown will roll out on iOS for the iPhone and iPad as early as this week in some regions. Like FarmVille, it uses in-app purchases as its primary means of monetization. The game will become available worldwide in the coming weeks, available in English, French, Italian, Spanish and German. No region-specific content is planned at this time, Cinicolo says.

Beyond the iOS platform, Zynga is evaluating releases to other platforms, but declined to commit 100% to saying that Android is where CityVille is headed next. Zynga previously shied away from committing to an Android port of Hanging With Friends, however, it has brought several of its other iOS games to Android, including FarmVille — so the chances of CityVille Hometown finding its way there are fairly high.